Where you are in time and place is important. In the area of national security, disconnects and discontinuities in time and place caused by a desire for reality to be what we want it to be consume the finite resources of time, money, and focus from actions to address what reality actual is.
Denial fed by delusional distractions, as it were.
Take a moment to back up a bit and think about the top
national security concerns of 2021. What do they signal to you as the
most important parts of the United States’ national security infrastructure needs to
invest their time, money and reputation on?
Well meaning people can differ in how they rack and stack
things, but let me grab the Top-3 from my seat the provinces:
1. Strategic impact of the national humiliation following our defeat and negotiated surrender in Afghanistan.
2. Expanded Chinese aggression in the Western Pacific and expanded global influence.
3. Growing Russian hostility in Eastern Europe and her near abroad.
Honorable mentions could include sectarian and religious
based conflicts in Africa, domestic logistics and manufacturing short comings,
and other actionable national security adjacent challenges could be put in the
top-3.
So, let’s say you find yourself just inside a month after the
national humiliation in Afghanistan in late August and you have an opportunity
for the US Navy’s top four institutions of higher learning; Naval War College,
Naval Post Graduate School, Marine Corps University, and the Naval Academy to come
together – not a common occurrence - to have a “Combined Naval Address” on a
topic of great concern. What would you want them to invest their professional
capital in?
By all means, I invite you to watch it – you paid for it.
Just fair warning – this isn’t what it is billed to be. You have an intro by a
PMP CDR followed by the reading of a prepared statement by the President of the
U.S. Naval War College, then they hand it over to serial Australian TED entrepreneur
Saul Griffith whose major skill seems to be able to sell hyped companies that
get people excited enough to buy them, only to realize once the ayahuasca trip wears
off that … well … perhaps big-ass kites as wind turbines might actually not be
all that great of an idea.
That’s it. Funded by the Naval War College - I assume the speaker is paid for. I do wonder how much.
Even better we find that the Barrows Fellows from the Marine Corps University will spend all year studying <checks notes, this is the year we were defeated in Afghanistan by the Taliban> ... climate change.
For the record, by their own definition,
The General Robert H. Barrow Fellowship seeks to explore and understand different aspects of security and strategy as it relates to great power competition.
Great. Wonderful. Timely.
For those who don’t have the time to watch the whole thing, Griffith, looking like he just got off a ayahuasca trip himself, spends a few minutes telling everyone - shocking - that DOD's largest energy use is jet fuel.
We know.
He then spends most of the next 3/4 of an hour reading repackaged slides my kids were shown after the Al Gore movie in middle school weaved in with a recant of standard issue neo-pagan climate grift
that has nothing to do with anything impacting any maritime service - much less "great power competition." No, this is mostly about turning residential civilian America electric - not a military concern.
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